


cast off all my bandages and see what happens next

by infiniteandsmall



Category: Yuri!!! on Ice (Anime)
Genre: M/M, Mental Illness, bipolar/adhd viktor, telling stories with your body, viktor's childhood, viktor's mysterious parents, weird family issues, young hot and mentally unstable!
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-04
Updated: 2017-05-04
Packaged: 2018-10-27 22:01:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,482
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10817610
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/infiniteandsmall/pseuds/infiniteandsmall
Summary: “I want to do that,” he says, as the boy in the costume that looks like the sea skates off the ice, waving, maybe right at Viktor. Viktor jumps up and down on the tips of his toes. “I want to do that,” he says again, because he has to, he has to skate like the boy in the costume that looks like the sea.“You want to skate, Vitya?” his father says, patting his shoulder. Viktor notices, absently, but he doesn’t care much, because he feels something going through him like the feeling of the shock he gets when he rubs his feet on the carpets in wintertime, and it doesn’t leave much space to pay attention to his father’s hand on his shoulder. “I used to skate, when I was a boy. My friends and I would race each other. You can really get some speed on those things.”Racing. Stupid! Viktor thinks. “I don’t want to race,” Viktor says. “I want to dance. I’m going to dance on the ice, just like he did!”-five times viktor dances, one time he doesn't, and one time he dances with the love of his life





	cast off all my bandages and see what happens next

**Author's Note:**

> here is an odd little thing i tossed together from pieces i cut from other fics. if you have read any of the other fics you probably will realize what was from where. this is very extra and redundant but i missed writing and i didnt have time to work on anything else with finals so i glued this together (with a lot of glue!) and figured i may as well toss it up! i am excited to finish a phichit fic once i'm through with finals. until then: *chef finger kissing motion*  
> title from the mummy's hand by the mountain goats!  
> debated on how mentally ill to make viktor, decided: fuck it, very. i am not sure if i would definitively read him as this mentally ill in canon. i definitely would read him as this adhd though! neither are explicitly mentioned but are described throughout the fic.

Viktor is seven, and he itches all over, sitting in the big chair at the kitchen table. His shoulders go back and forth. His fingers go scratch scratch scratch over the paper of his math homework. His knee goes up and down and up and down, the flex of ankle as he curls his bare toes over the rung of the chair like the press press press of music. He thinks of the song his mama sings to him, because he has the same first name as the singer: Viktor! It goes, _songs of mine that I’ve yet to write!_ Viktor sings the words, and his feet skim easy over the wood of the floor and he twirls around, spins on the tip of his toes until he’s dizzy. It feels good, for the speed of his spins to pull at his arms and legs. It feels good to move.

 _“Viktor!”_ his mama says, sharp in the doorway all of a sudden. Viktor presses his feet flat to the floor and freezes. “I can’t leave you alone for five minutes?” she says, voice all closed up like she has a sore throat. “We just talked about this, Vitya!” she says, leaving him standing still in the center of the kitchen while she leans over the table to look at the abandoned math homework.

“You haven’t done a single problem,” she says, pressing the paper against the table with the palm of her hand. Her shoulders curl up.

“Mama, I’m sorry,” he says, and rushes to hug her. His own shoulders are curling now; he feels prickly from his stomach to his toes.

She puts one flat hand against his back and squeezes. He needs to do his homework, so that he will be easy for her to love.

She holds his hand and settles him back in his chair.

“Get that done,” she says, stern, without even a pet name to soften her words. Viktor feels bad _all over_. He squirms in his seat, runs his hands against the roughness of the underside of the table to make the bad sink away from the edges of his skin.

“Mama, I’m sorry,” he says again.

She’s standing at the sink washing dishes. She has her dishtowel knotted around her waist, she wraps her hands in it as she turns and gives Viktor a sigh and a smile.

“I know, Vitya,” she says. “Be a smart boy for me and do your homework, now.”

His feet swing against the legs of the chair. There’s dancing in them. They _itch_.  Math homework doesn’t make the itch go away.

Viktor sighs, draws a squiggly snake in the corner of his paper, then erases it so that he won’t get his knuckles rapped for doodling again. Math, do his homework for Mama, then he will go to his room and dance until his Mama tells him that he is disturbing Papa, that he has to stop banging around up there and go to sleep.

 

Viktor is eight, and he goes to visit his grandparents in St. Petersberg. They are his papa’s parents, and have a lot of money, he knows, because his mama frets about how he must behave, and not break anything, and keep his clothes clean. His mama is stiff around them and won’t sing with Viktor or pull him onto her lap to read with him, but his papa seems happy, and the night before they leave to go back to Moscow, Grandmother and Grandfather take Viktor to the ballet.

It’s like nothing Viktor’s ever seen. The dancers move like it’s all they ever do. He imagines them dancing from their beds to the kitchen to get a glass of water in the middle of the night when they can’t sleep. He sings the music the whole drive back to Moscow, which is hard because there aren’t any words to it, just sounds.

“Vitya, would you stop that?” his mama says at halfway-there-even-though-she-said-halfway-there-like-a-million-years-ago.

“Sorry, Mama,” Viktor says, but the song comes out of him anyways, in his shoulders and his legs.

“Don’t kick my seat, either!” his mama says.

“It’s been a long drive,” his papa says. “You could be a little more patient.”

“He’s old enough to sit still,” his mama snaps.

“I’m sorry,” Viktor says again, and looks out the window. The dancers took long steps, like they could reach all the way across the fields he sees rolling out to the sky in maybe, like, only three steps, and sometimes when the song had been sad they had _moved_ so sad it made Viktor’s stomach hurt.

“Mama,” he says.

“Um-hm,” she says. She is looking out the window too. She hadn’t gone to the ballet, she had gone out to a nice dinner with Viktor’s papa. Viktor wonders what she is seeing out the window.

“I want to be like the dancers,” he says. “When I grow up.”

She doesn’t turn back to look at him, just keeps looking out the window. “Okay, Vitya,” she says, and her voice is very quiet. “When we get home, maybe we’ll see about getting you dance lessons, yeah? What do you say, Gosha?”

“Sounds great,” Viktor’s papa says, the same way that Viktor says “yes” when Mrs. Petrova asks him if he was listening when she was talking about addition and subtraction when he wasn’t, really.

When the day of his first dance class finally comes, Viktor is so excited he walks out of the house without shoes, and then with the shoes on the wrong feet. When they reach the dance studio, his mama says, “now, you behave for Ms. Lyasheva, Vitya,” and takes him by the shoulders. Viktor nods, but he is watching as the class before him, all little kids, getting stuffed into their coats by their parents to go out in the cold. “Look at me, Viktor!” his mama says, sharp, and Viktor knows he did something wrong, not the kind of something wrong that gets him sent to bed without supper but the kind of wrong that makes his mama’s mouth get all pinched and upset. He knows the something wrong was not looking at his mama when she was telling him something important, but it’s hard to look at his mama’s face, which he knows very well, when there are so many new things around him. Viktor tears his eyes away from the big mirrors and the shiny empty space of the floor, which reflects the bright lights on the ceiling, and the big metal barre and his teacher, who wears her hair pulled back so tight that Viktor can see how it pulls at the corners of her eyes, and looks at his mama.

“Promise me,” she says.

“I will,” Viktor says, and nods.

“Ah, so serious!” Viktor’s teacher says. “Now come with me, Vitya. You can watch if you would like, or if you have errands to run, we’ll be done at five, Mrs. Nikiforova.”

“My last name is Vasilieva, actually,” Viktor’s mama says, the pressed-down way she always says it. “I’ll be back at five.” She fixes her eyes on Viktor. “Be good, now,” she says, the same way that people on TV sound when someone is sick and they are begging them to get well, and she reaches her hands out to Viktor. He goes to her, and a kiss is pressed to his forehead, and then she leaves and he follows his teacher out onto the big shiny floor, and then the music starts.

It’s not like the music his mama listens to. She likes rock music, with the loud count of the drums like the sound of the Metro car pulling into the station, which she plays whenever Viktor’s papa is away at work. This music goes up and down in Viktor’s ears, and fills up the whole room quick. It’s the ballet music, and Ms. Lyasheva shows them how to stretch, and then first position, and then they go across the floor in the great big leaps, and Viktor feels like he might bang his head on the ceiling, he jumps so high.

Sometimes Viktor thinks he is a glass getting filled and filled with water until it spills over the sides, but when he dances, everything holds together inside of him.

When his mama comes to pick him up, she asks his teacher if he behaved.

“Wonderfully,” Ms. Lyasheva assures. “He took to it right away.” She lowers her voice. “If you must know, he was perhaps the most attentive student in class.”

“My Vitya?” his mama says, and shrugs. “I’m not sure if that’s true, but thank you.”

“Of course,” Ms. Lyasheva says.

Viktor is already thinking of how he can hold onto the edge of his parent’s dresser like he held onto the barre, and how his mama can push the couches in the living room out of the way so Viktor would have the whole floor to dance on.

 

Irina is two years older than Viktor, eleven.

“Vitya,” she says before class on day. “You should come watch my figure skating competition this weekend. It’s on Saturday, ask your mom! And if you stay after I skate, the older kids will skate, the ones who are really good.”

“I’ll ask,” Viktor says. Irina is one of the best dancers in the class. She is graceful and always pays attention and remembers all the steps, so that Ms. Lyasheva doesn’t have to repeat herself. He hates it when everyone is talking and so they all have to wait while Ms. Lyasheva goes over the steps again. Viktor wants to try them out as soon as possible and see how they feel.

“Mama,” he says when she comes to pick him up. “Mama, Irina wants to know if I can come and watch her skate in her competition this weekend. Please, can I?”

“I’ll ask your father,” she says. “Now go get your coat, where’d you put it?”

Viktor doesn’t remember, and she has to come to the changing room and help him hunt for it. She talks to his father that night.

“I know it’s not the way you might want to spend a Saturday, but I’ve got to work, and it’s good that he’s finally made a friend,” his mother says.

He can’t hear what his father says in his deep rumbly voice, but he can hear his mother say, “it’s not his fault that the boys at school pick on him.” He knows that sound underneath her voice that means she’s going to start yelling soon, and then his dad will too, and they will fight until he hears a door slam, when one or the other goes to bed. He jams his hands over his ears and wishes he could go in and explain that it wasn’t important for him to go, that he could just make them stop. They have been dancing to music from _Swan Lake_ lately. Viktor can hear the song in his head: he doesn’t know all the instruments that make the different sounds, but there are different ones playing different lines of notes at the same time. He plays the melody, and the steps, over and over, and if he’s careful and thinks about it hard, he can play all the different notes and dance the steps in his head all at the same time, and then it is like there is nowhere but the song and the dance: he can hear nothing, cannot feel the blankets against his skin.

 

“I want to do that,” he says, as the boy in the costume that looks like the sea skates off the ice, waving, maybe right at Viktor. Viktor jumps up and down on the tips of his toes. “I want to do that,” he says again, because he has to, he has to skate like the boy in the costume that looks like the sea.

“You want to skate, Vitya?” his father says, patting his shoulder. Viktor notices, absently, but he doesn’t care much, because he feels something going through him like the feeling of the shock he gets when he rubs his feet on the carpets in wintertime, and it doesn’t leave much space to pay attention to his father’s hand on his shoulder. “I used to skate, when I was a boy. My friends and I would race each other. You can really get some speed on those things.”

Racing. Stupid! Viktor thinks. “I don’t want to race,” Viktor says. “I want to _dance._ I’m going to dance on the ice, just like he did! I'm going to jump like him, too, he was so-o-o good, he should totally win!”

His father shakes his head. “Sit down, Vitya. We’ll see about it.”

 

The first time Viktor skates, he feels like one of the little four year olds at the dance studio, wobbling all over the place like a baby. He feels dumb and clumsy. He watches Coach Daniil carefully. He’s a grown-up, but not a _grown-up_ grown-up like Viktor’s mom or dad. He has brown hair and a nice smile and he looks like being on the ice is as easy as being on the ground. Viktor wants to look like that, more than anything.

The second time Viktor skates, Coach Daniil says, “now, all of you, look at Vitya. See how he’s relaxed? If you’re relaxed, it will be easier to keep your balance.”

He has them all take deep breaths and shake their arms out to loosen up, and Viktor feels triumphant and warm.

After Viktor has been skating for two months, Coach Daniil suggests that Viktor should take private skating lessons with Coach Ivan, who used to travel all around the world competing, even to America and China and Spain.

“I’ve never had a kid who learned so quick,” Coach Daniil says. “I think he has a lot of potential, if he gets more time on the ice.”

“Thank you,” Viktor’s mom says. “I’ll think about.”

That night, Viktor does his stretches on the floor, watching TV, while his mom hangs out of the window, talking on the phone and smoking. His dad’s still out at work. His mom is talking about him, because she thinks he can’t hear with the TV playing.

“His dance teacher and his skating coach, or whatever you call it,” his mom says, waving her cigarette in an arc in the air, “say that he’s one of their best students. I don’t know why he can listen to them, and not to me. And I would understand it, if he was one of those rough boys, you know, Olya,” his mama says. “But he isn’t, he’s. Too gentle, sometimes.”

She’s quiet, sucking in smoke and blowing it out into the city. He likes watching his mom smoke, the way she dangles the cigarette carelessly off her fingers, the deep red glow of the lit end, but he can only see her back, turned to him. “I know, I know,” she says. “I just. Ah. I don’t remember being like this, as a kid. I wish I knew what the hell he’s thinking, sometimes.”

Viktor feels his muscles burn, and then feels the burn fade away. A burn and a push, a burn and a push.

“Yeah,” his mother says, leaning further out the window. “Yeah.”

 

When Viktor is ten, his father moves to St. Petersberg. It is strange to not hear his parents arguing at night anymore. When his father tells him that he will be moving, Viktor thinks first of the ballet, and then feels ashamed. After his father moves away, his mother spends a lot of nights out with her friends. Viktor doesn’t mind being alone: he can practice his dances and watch whatever he wants on TV and talk out loud to himself without bothering anyone. His father is working at Grandfather’s company now. He travels a lot, but not to America or China like Coach Ivan had. He calls Viktor every week, and Viktor will go visit St. Petersberg during Easter, because it’s not terribly far in the big space that is Russia. Viktor learned in school that it is the biggest country in the world. Sometimes his thoughts sprawl out so much he’s worried they stretch over all the way over the space between the lines on the map that hangs on the wall in his classroom.

That is the year that Yakov Feltsman comes to Moscow. Viktor has heard of Coach Feltsman, has seen him sitting next to his skaters on TV.

“I want you to talk to him,” Coach Ivan says.

Coach Feltsman looks even solider in real life than on TV, and when he watches Viktor skate Viktor tries to do everything right, until he is out-of-breath and his forehead feels sweat-slippery when he swipes a hand over it. “You’re not bad,” Coach Feltsman says. “You could be great, if you’re willing to work hard.”

“I am,” Viktor says.

“You don’t know what hard work is, now,” Coach Feltsman says. “But somehow, I still believe you.” He doesn’t say it as an aside to Coach Ivan, the way other grown-ups might. Viktor likes that.

 

Viktor is seventeen, and has never been to a club before. He kind of forgets that he’s old enough to get into clubs easy now until all of a sudden he remembers, when he’s sinking into his left splits and listening to Yakov yell into his mobile at Alexei, who didn’t show up for practice again, “either you want to spend all night under a disco ball or you want to skate!”

“A disco ball,” Anatoly snickers, stretching his hamstrings on a mat next to Viktor.

Viktor hasn’t really considered whether clubs have disco balls or not. He’s been preoccupied with a book he’s been reading lately about the process of rebuilding the American figure skating team after the Flight 548 crash in the sixties. He’s been working on his quad flip, too. He has physics to study for when he gets home, which would be interesting if there weren’t better things to do with his time: reading about torque is deadly boring compared to _feeling_ torque deep in his joints during a spin or a jump.

He knows there are clubs in St. Petersberg. He just hadn’t ever thought of what to do with that information.

Later that week, when everything seems blunted like an over-used knife, he thinks of dancing, of loud music. He wants, and the want is sharp enough to make him miss sharp feelings.

He remembers Alexei mentioning the name of a few clubs. He chooses one and gets in easy.

He knows he looks hot, with his hair falling down his back, and his shirt very small and thin and loose enough to slide off a shoulder, to say, _why yes, your hand would fit under this easily_ , glitter on his lips and his eyelids and his cheekbones, his hipbones sticking out from under the hem of his shirt and above the waist of his jeans.

The music slides into his body, makes shivers run up and down his spine. He doesn’t bother to buy a drink. He thinks maybe he’ll be able to get someone to buy for him. The thought makes him smile, and he lets himself forget _bend your elbows a little more! Don’t arch your back so much_ , throws his head back, his hair already sticking to his forehead with sweat.

There’s a hand on the swell of muscle on Viktor’s lower back, a boy grinding against his thigh, another boy catching his eye in the bright flash of lights with a look like he wants to eat Viktor alive.

A shiver runs down Viktor’s spine all over again, an ache spreading low in his belly. His tilts his chin up, shows the boy his throat. The boy grins, all predatory and straight white teeth, slides close to Viktor and wraps his arms around Viktor’s waist and pulls Viktor’s hips flush with his.

“Here,” Olga, one of the older skaters, says when he shows up (just a _little_ late) for practice the next day, hanging him a tube of concealer.

“What for?” Viktor says.

“Um,” Olga says, gesturing to her neck.

Viktor presses a finger to his neck, and remembers. “Oh. Thanks!” he says.

“You better hurry, Yakov’s getting red,” she says.

“God,” Viktor groans. When Viktor had first moved to St. Petersberg to train, he had lived with his father. This had lasted for about one week before his father had decided that he would take Coach Feltman’s up on his offer for Viktor to stay at his and Lilia’s home, while Viktor’s father had been away on business. Viktor had never fully moved back into his room in his father’s apartment, bouncing between Coach Yakov’s and his father’s like a kid whose parents were divorced.

No one has been able to get a hold of his mother in months, and Viktor visits his dad’s on holidays if his dad is in the city, but Yakov is the one whose house Viktor moved out of in favor of his own apartment, and Yakov is the one who had taught Viktor how to drive and write a check, and also the one who scolds Viktor for being late or not wearing warm enough clothes or for saying things without thinking about the way they sound first.

He dabs the concealer on very quickly. “Anatoly, does this look okay?” he says, gesturing to his neck before rushing out of the locker room.

“It depends what you mean by okay,” Anatoly shrugs.

“You’re late,” Yakov says.

“Compulsory figures?” Viktor says. Viktor thinks compulsory figures are as boring as practicing penmanship in grade school. Yakov thinks they build discipline.

“Compulsory figures,” Yakov says. Mercifully, he makes no other comments.

 

Chris is technically too young to get into this particular club.

He does anyways.

If Viktor had the sort of quality that made boys buy him drinks, Chris’n’Vik, together, have that quality doubled, or maybe even tripled.

They both like their drinks awful and fruity, and so Viktor isn’t sure whether he can taste his own drink or Chris’s on Chris’s mouth. There’s a blur of bodies around them, hands on them, Chris grinding so hard against Viktor that their kiss turns into few little gasps against each other’s lips. Chris shoves his face into Viktor’s neck, bites down soft. Viktor’s head’s been twisting lately with the need to move, restlessness sore and scratchy through his skull, to do something outside of his usual routine of rink-to-studio-to-gym-to-apartment-to-sleep.  There isn’t anything now but the lights and the music and the need for _more, more, please,_ as Chris rolls his body against Viktor and bites again on Viktor’s neck, hard this time.

 _God,_ Viktor loves dancing.

“Don’t get off on me, already, Giacometti,” Viktor hisses into Chris’s ear, laughing and threading his fingers through Chris’s hair to curl them around them around the back of Chris’s head. “Embarrassing!”

“Think of it as a compliment,” Chris says back, so low that Viktor can barely hear him over the bass.

“Don’t get off on me, yet, I meant,” Viktor says. Chris grins up at him, and Viktor grins back, gives Chris’s hair a little tug

“You're talking really fast,” Chris says as they sit in the back of a taxi heading back to Viktor’s apartment. Viktor is narrating the drive in breathless purple drunk detail, and he feels as though he floating somewhere behind his face. He doesn’t feel the words on his tongue but he can hear them spilling out.

“Yeah. Yeah, I guess I am,” Viktor says, pulling away from the bright TV screen of the window. Chris’s eyes glitter in the dark. “You’re going to make an awful joke, aren’t you?” Viktor says, and hopes the cab driver does not speak French.

“I’m trying to think of it,” Chris says. “Something about putting your mouth to work.”

“Oh, that is awful,” Viktor says, shoving the soles of his shoes against Chris’s thigh. “I hope you do.”

Viktor’s apartment is still, only the hum of electricity in the walls. It’s late enough that the furniture has begun settling, odd creaks like achy joints. He notices all of this as if it is very far away. He feels scattered and rattley.

“Okay, you Russians and your clubs are fucking crazy, my ears are still _ringing,_ ” Chris says. “Turn on the lights or I’ll stub my toe trying to find your bedroom.”

Lights, lights. Viktor knows where the lights are in his apartment without thinking. He knows how to undress Chris and take him apart slow without thinking. He doesn’t need to think, and so he can float as if underwater. His thoughts go quiet when Chris directs him where he wants him, until Chris is swearing and Viktor is breathing in hard little gasps and they’re both worn out, collapsing in on each other and passing out in cold deep sleeps, sticky in each other’s arms.

 

Viktor had gotten them rink time the next day, easily because Yakov is out of town with Lilia, somewhere warm in Italy, and most of Viktor’s rinkmates have straggled home in the burst of released pressure immediately post-season. He usually skates in the morning, but he knows Chris hates waking up, and so he had booked a slot in the afternoon.  They scrape together a breakfast from Viktor’s kitchen cabinets, the feeling of someone else in Viktor’s apartment strange. He doesn’t mind Chris in his apartment as he would mind the other boys he brings home. Chris takes the bareness and anonymity of Viktor’s apartment in stride, and is very nice to Makkachin despite the fact that he is a more of a cat person than a dog person. It is strange because he knows that Chris will be gone soon, and Viktor will rattle around his apartment like the last teabag in the box again. They will walk to the rink, because the rink is not far from Viktor’s apartment, and they leave early enough that they can walk slow the whole way there.

The sky's heavy with those dark bruised spring storm clouds, the wind cold and smelling like overripe plums. Viktor looks around at the eerie way the light is cast on the shops and cars and office buildings and wraps his arms across his chest.

“You're all dreamy right now. Abstracted,” Chris says, waving a hand Viktor’s way.

“Wow. Abstracted?” Viktor says. “Ah, the college student.” Chris rolls his eyes and ducks his head over the little grin that dances in the corners of his mouth, but it slides off quick. “You don't look particularly dreamy or abstracted right now,” Viktor says, looking at the way Chris’s jaw is locked and his eyebrows are furrowed.

Chris groans, digs the heels of his hands into his eyes. “This fucking season, god,” he says, shoving his hands back into his coat pockets. “Everything just feels so...deflated, ever since the Olympics. You know?”

Viktor feels far from deflated. He feels jubilant and soaring. He feels like he could punch things, or maybe write a whole novel, or jump off a roof and fly. He doesn’t know what to say.

“Of course you don't,” Chris says, when Viktor’s silence gets too long. Viktor can tell that he's upset, and mad. Viktor thinks of reaching out his hand towards Chris, to see how mad he really is, is he mad enough to not take it? But Viktor doesn’t, just tucks the flapping end of his scarf into the crook of his elbow.

They walk the rest of the way to the rink with the roar of the wind and the traffic in their ears, lace up their skates side-by-side. Chris’s irritation drips away, minute-by-minute, until the quiet is just intimate. The rink is empty, the cold metallic sound of their blades on the ice loud. The sun streams through the big windows for a few minutes, before fading out unobtrusively again. Skating is kind of like having sex, or reading, Viktor thinks: the world gets narrow, like going through a railway tunnel. Touch. Turn the page. Spot, jump, land. It’s not too complicated. It’s easy to sink into and get lost in. He does compulsory figures until he feels like he is skating through syrup, and then leans back on the boards and drinks from his water bottle and watches Chris finish his warmup.

They push each other, when they skate together. It isn’t conceited for Viktor to say, just obvious, that Chris is a better skater when he shares the ice with Viktor. There’s something ferocious about his skating, sometimes, like he either wants to fight the audience or fuck them. Viktor likes to watch when he skates like that.

“How’s the Lutz going, Giacometti?” Viktor calls, when Chris’s figures stall out into something wooden while he thinks, clearly, of something else.

Chris’s head snaps up, a bright sharp smirk on his face. “It’s going.”

“Interesting,” Viktor says.

“Very,” Chris says. “Wanna see? And don’t say I’ll show you mine if you show me yours.”

“Cruel,” Viktor sighs, setting his water bottle down and skating Chris’s way.

They goad each other into cleaner and cleaner jumps and spins, and then when they’re too tired for serious work, they noodle around with pair skating elements.

They’re not particularly good at it. Singles skating is, in essence, a self-centered sport. Sometimes, though, they match up. Only for a few seconds, sure, but those few seconds feel almost like dancing.

 

Chris is due home before Yakov and Lilia come back. After Viktor gets back from the airport, he takes the key to Lilia’s studio, which she had gotten made for him and given to him wordlessly, and goes there. He feels urgent, and like something is his fault, but he doesn’t know what the something is. His head jabbers, insistent. He thinks the sight of himself in the big mirrors that line the walls of Lilia’s studio will show him that he is not in danger of slipping out of himself. It’s the acid, it’s the acid, you really shouldn’t do acid again, he tells himself, it’s been a whole day and he’s still unsettled and off, and when he arrives at Lilia’s studio he finds that the endless recursion of the mirrors is horrifying, and has to sit in the center of the floor for a while. He begins stretching, unconsciously, because his body tells him that when sitting on the floor of a dance studio, stretches must be done. He is thinking of his doctor, who he has been seeing since he was a teenager, who said when he looked at Viktor’s family history, that Viktor should be careful, because illnesses like his mother’s came on, often, in one’s early twenties.

It had clearly made the doctor uncomfortable, to see Viktor sitting, strong and healthy and thick-haired, and listen to his lungs and his resting heart rate, and think of Viktor as harboring _something_ in his head, something like whatever was in his mother's head that made her take all of her sleeping pills at once. Viktor imagined it as a black quick squirming worm, like a dark living blood clot.

Viktor finishes stretching, looks carefully at the mirrors through his eyelashes. He goes home without dancing, lies in bed with Makkachin and tries to sleep. He needs Yakov back, needs the semblance of routine. Without that he is a body with no bones. But he can’t sleep, and Yakov is in Italy, so he holds Makkachin tight and takes deep breaths and tries to let it pass.

 

Viktor is thirty and slightly champagne drunk. Being slightly champagne drunk is a ISU banquet tradition, with rare exceptions in the form of someone getting completely champagne wasted, which is a story for the history books, now. A waltz begins playing. Viktor gets maudlin: where is his husband, who was once that rare champagne-wasted exception? Dancing with Phichit, Viktor knows, but _where_ , why are Yuuri and Phichit both so short?

“Chris,” Viktor says, jogging Chris’s elbow back and forth. “Chris, help. I miss Yuuri.”

“Aw, poor Viktor,” Chris says, freeing his elbow from Viktor’s grasp and patting Viktor’s head.

“I can’t find him, Chris,” Viktor says. “I’m desolate.”

“Do you want me to put up a pole and attract him? It’s worked in the past,” Chris deadpans.

“No!” Viktor says. “Here, put me up on your shoulders so then I can see him.”

“You can climb on my back,” Chris says. “No further. You’re going to split your pants open if you try anything else.”

“You have so little faith in me,” Viktor says.

“Listen,” Chris says. “Just come with me out on the dancefloor like a normal person, and look for the best dancer here, and you’ll find my man, and then keep looking and find the second best dancer, and then you’ll find Yuuri.”

“It’s the other way around,” Viktor says. “Let’s have a fistfight and make such a commotion that Yuuri will have to notice.”

“Compelling, but no,” Chris says. “Also, my superior height spots your husband at eight o’ clock.”

“I have no idea where eight o’ clock is,” Viktor says, but then he spots Yuuri, too, Yuuri, flushed red all the way to the shells of his ears, Phichit on his arm. Yuuri is wearing that half-shy half-sly smile that always make Viktor want to toss himself dramatically at Yuuri's feet.

“You did a little gasp when you saw him,” Chris says. “It was cute.”

“It’s because he’s so handsome,” Viktor says, holding a hand out towards Yuuri. Viktor is champagne-tipsy and firmly nested in his husband’s arms, as Yuuri slides in and wraps an arm around his waist.

“I was looking for you,” Yuuri says. “I want to waltz.”

“I'm going to pass out,” Viktor says, delighted, pressing a hand to his throat.

“So ridiculous,” Yuuri says, sounding tremendously pleased. “Come on!” Chris gives Viktor’s shoulder a little shove, and Phichit gives Yuuri’s shoulder a shove of its own, and they trip over each other’s feet onto the dancefloor.

Yuuri could dance a waltz so lovely it could make a ballroom swoon in his sleep, and Viktor is the one in his arms. No one else. Viktor feels simultaneously possessed and possessive, a warm hot glow through him. It's good to be directed, Yuuri’s hand splayed across his back.

“You lead now,” Yuuri says. “I want to see what you can do.”

“Oh, I will,” Viktor says, doing his best to be smug as his heart jumps up in his throat.

“Show me off, then,” Yuuri says.

Viktor does, sweeping Yuuri up off his feet for a second so that Yuuri yelps sharp and grins and curls a hand around the back of Viktor’s neck for balance.

“I think,” Viktor says, “that we should just dance like this all the way home.”

“All the way back to Japan?” Yuuri says, raising an eyebrow and smiling. Viktor doesn’t think he could walk on water, but he thinks maybe Yuuri could dance on it, could haul him all the way back to Hatsetsu on sheer grace and force of will.

“Maybe just back up to our room,” Viktor says.

Viktor shivers and shudders into Yuuri’s arms that night, remembering the first night they had met. Sex with Yuuri is not like dancing: when Viktor dances he can feel an absence, the absence of the ice. He thinks that maybe sex is like dancing for Yuuri, or maybe for Yuuri things are not much like other things, but each in their own separate box, but he moves with an almost eerie grace, fluidity in his back and shoulders and arms and hands and the point of his feet, even when he’s slack-jawed and desperate and so close to coming that he’s rhythmless.

“I think we should get married about five times,” Viktor says, making sure to set an alarm on his phone so they won’t miss their flight tomorrow, while Yuuri slides into a pair of sweatpants to sleep in because he always gets cold in hotel rooms. “That sounds right, yes?”

“Six,” Yuuri says, wiggling back under the covers and closer-closer-close to Viktor.

“Seven,” Viktor suggests.

“Let’s pool all of our gold medals, and that’s how many time we’ll get married,” Yuuri says, and Viktor runs his hands up and down Yuuri’s bare back, the contours of his scapulas, the bumps of his spine, the acne scars on his shoulders.

“I’ll melt them all down,” Viktor says. “Millions of rings.” He likes to say the most ridiculous things to Yuuri and watch his eyes get wide and watch him blink his long eyelashes and then feel the way he presses even closer to Viktor, like they’re two magnets with the strangest fields.

“The ISU’s not generous enough with the actual gold for a million, I don’t think,” Yuuri says.

“Let me woo the practicality out of you for a second, Yuuri,” Viktor says, shoving his face into Yuuri’s shoulder.

“Ah, who remembered to pack the lube, though?” Yuuri says. “Who wants to woo the practicality out of me now?”

“You know I love it when you’re practical,” Viktor says.

Yuuri hums a little and fits a hand over the jut of Viktor’s hipbone. “Do you ever have dreams about dancing?” he says, the way he sometimes swings the topic around in a way that makes sense to him, his internal logic something Viktor can never quite follow. It’s delightful, when it’s not confusing, and sometimes when it is confusing. Viktor tries to always answer Yuuri, if he can, when Yuuri asks him things, and Yuuri doesn’t give him warnings in advance to give Viktor time to make a mask.

“Sometimes,” Viktor says. “Mostly I just dream that I’m skating, but my feet are bare. It doesn’t feel any different, though. And the ice never feels cold. I don’t know if they’re good dreams.” He remembers he had had them a lot after finding out about his mother’s death, and last year when he’d had the worst paranoid bout he’d had since his twenties, when Yuuri had dragged him to a therapist and he’d emerged with a handful of diagnoses that he was still trying to figure out how to handle. He thinks that they usually aren’t good, then, but he’s not always great at remembering things.  

“I have bad dancing dreams sometimes. I think I usually have more bad dreams than good ones.” Yuuri says. “But sometimes, I have really good dancing dreams. I can never remember them very well when I wake up. Just that I was happy and that I was dancing.”

“Happy and dancing,” Viktor says. “I like that.”

“I do, too,” Yuuri says. “Let’s make it a wedding theme.”

“Sounds perfect,” Viktor says.


End file.
